Gareth Hugh Davies

Gareth Hugh Davies is best known for the powerful, enigmatic and haunting imagery in his paintings. This series of paintings is the result of work carried out on location and in the studio. Everything begins with drawing, and remembering. They begin as an immediate response to a particular landscape but may transform with continual reworking and re-examining to the extent that topographical concerns become secondary, and a more personal visceral response is allowed to develop. Texture and surface are important to me, the physical aspect of paint, how it handles and continues to surprise with its ability to conjure the vast from the smallest of marks and gestures. It can express the unsayable. Magritte said of his Empire of Light series of paintings that ‘The landscape suggests night and the skyscape day. This evocation of night and day seems to me to have the power to surprise and delight us. I call this power: poetry’ I think this notion of ‘poetry’ has underpinned my recent approach to painting, the notion that the intangible can be suggested through the juxtaposition of form, colour and line. An idea of landscape, reimagined and remembered to convey feeling and a sense of a psychological space.